Then there's the mysterious girl Mishima Reika who tends to pop up randomly and sporadically - like those gophers in that game at the arcade with the hammer and they keep popping up and I keep missing them and they make that high-pitched laughing sound and I cry. Damn those gophers.

One of these days, some enterprising company is going to market a video-game tie-in for anime titles like RahXephon that simply lets players smack the series' protagonists upside the head until they get some sense. It might not be as exciting as the usual video-game puzzle-solving and firefighting, but in some cases, it would be a lot more integrally satisfying.